


and words are futile devices

by overnights



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Missing Scene, epistolary adjacent, harrow's "i've got a hundred thrown out speeches i almost said to you" moment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:54:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29179065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/overnights/pseuds/overnights
Summary: Harrowhark Nonagesimus was a walking war crime. She was the darkness that had extinguished dozens of lights. She was flesh and blood built from the bones of the Ninth’s innocents, her birth the flame that had lit the funeral pyres of two hundred children, and yet it was the death of Gideon Nav that had finally brought her to irreversible ruin.She let out a pitiful noise, dangerously close to a sob, and reached for another sheet of paper.[Harrow, her grief, and a letter to Gideon.]
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 12
Kudos: 91





	and words are futile devices

**Author's Note:**

> this is approximately 90% shorter than most of my fics, which feels very strange, but i read this [tweet](https://twitter.com/korrasatx/status/1356353108595638273?s=20) by twitter user korrasatx and thought Hey I Have To Write This

I cannot make speeches...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what i am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman...would have borne it.  
  
\- Jane Austen, from _Emma_  


  
  
  


Nine months and twenty-nine days before the murder of the Emperor, Harrowhark Nonagesimus sat down to write a series of letters. 

She wrote out twenty-one missives in careful, spiky, angular handwriting, each word scribed in a deep onyx ink. Each letter contained something different, and no two were the same. Instructions, reminders, directives; they all flowed easily from the tip of her pen. She carefully placed each note in a cream colored manila envelope - real paper, not the flimsy that she was so accustomed to from a lifetime spent in a forgotten and destitute corner of the universe - and sealed them with an effortlessly surgical precision. 

Twenty-one letters were written and sealed within minutes, and Harrow allowed herself a tiny, distant shred of comfort at the efficient orderliness of the envelopes. It was a spark in the darkness, a remnant of sanity in the ocean of chaos that had been sweeping unchecked through the depths of her mind. 

And then she reached for the last sheet of paper, and time froze around her. Her pen hovered over the page, unmoving, ink dripping from the tip like blood seeping from a fatal wound. 

She could not write this letter. She did not know how.

Harrow put the pen down on the table, ink smearing across her fingers, and rested her head in her hands. It was a kind of surrender; her second in as many days. 

Two days previous, she had thrown herself at the feet of the Emperor - the King Undying, the Necrolord Prime, the Kindly Prince of Death - and begged for the life of Gideon Nav. And two days previous, he had looked at her with an expression full of pitying kindness and told her that it was impossible. And she had learned for the first time, with a kind of mind-betraying, soul-destroying horror, that God was not enough.

But it was not impossible. She knew that it was not impossible. There was a way to save Gideon, and Harrow was determined to follow it, no matter what the cost to herself. Gideon had always given her so much, and Harrow had always given her so little in return; this would be both repentance and reparation, a debt repaid. And, too, it would be a service to the universe; this endless darkness, this lonely space, this broken blackness would surely be better off with Gideon in it than herself. Gideon was the sun, and Harrow was nothing but a burnt out star, and for the first time in her life, Harrow had accepted that. 

She would save Gideon, for the pure and simple reason that she deserved to live. Gideon was a survivor and always had been, and she had deserved a better end than dying for someone who would be better off dead anyways. If Harrow was the reason that Gideon died, then she would also be the reason that Gideon lived. 

She had her plan, worn smooth at the edges from hours of turning it over in her mind. She had her letters, carefully written. She had her ally, albeit a twisted one of dubious loyalty and non-existent morality. Now all she needed to do was finish one last letter and let it begin. 

And yet she couldn’t write this letter. She fundamentally could not. There were no words in the English language that could possibly bridge the gap, fix the wound. There would never be word or time enough.

Harrow pressed the pen to the page, hard enough to tear a hole in the paper, and began writing. 

_Griddle,_

_If you’re reading this, it means that things have gone horribly wrong and I have yielded control of this body to you. Don’t do anything I would do, and definitely don’t do anything I_ wouldn’t _do. Don’t look at my body, you perverted idiot. Don’t deface my face with obscene graffiti. Don’t break my bones trying to lift your stupid sword. Don’t -_

The words swam in front of her vision, blurred in mocking lines. It was wrong. All wrong. 

She crumpled the paper, tossed it to the floor, and reached for a new page. 

_Griddle,_

_You’re dead, and I’m gone. You have to take over my - our body now. There’s a lot to be done, and you’ll have to be the one to do it; I am no longer here, and I may never be here again. I trust that you will know what to do. You are an idiot and a fool, but you know your duty. You always have._

_Just in case, here are some instructions: Find the Sixth. Don’t trust the Emperor._

_You gave me your life once. Now, I give you my life in return. Live, and don’t look back._

_Harrow._

Harrow dug a nail into her palm, carving a painful scratch into her flesh as she re-read the second letter. It was wrong too; wrong in different ways from the first. Too raw, too honest. Too much and yet not enough.

Third sheet of paper. 

_Griddle,_

_Do you remember that time when you told me that you’re not my cavalier primary and you never could have been? The world was caving in around us and we were balanced on the verge of death, but you told me that and suddenly the most important thing in my mind was a rebuttal of your statement. You were always the best of us._

_You almost drowned me once, or at least I thought you were going to. I wish you had. I wish you’d held my head under until I died._

No.

_Gideon,_

_You’re dead, and it’s my fault. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I should have done something. I should have saved you._

_I keep thinking about how I spent years wishing for your death. All those times that I wished you would die, and now you’re dead and I am ready to break the world to bring you back. The irony here is sickening, but that’s nothing new. We’ve been dealt losing hand after losing hand, and yet we play on._

Another page crumpled. Harrow pressed her head into her hands, pushing a palm to her temple; an ache began to permeate her skull, a muted pain seeping through her bones. The skull was an excellent conductor for sound, she thought - she wondered, dully, if hers could ever transmit the cathedral of lament in her mind, the choirs of her raging grief. 

She had so much to tell Gideon, so many things that she should have said before. So many words left unspoken and confessions left unsaid. But they were meant to be spoken in person, uttered in a sea of salt, whispered into the soft darkness of a bedroom. All those words, such hymns and prayers of honesty in her mouth, turned to ashes on the page. To adequately pen her thoughts was an exercise in futility; it was like trying to fill an ocean with drops of rain. 

Harrow thought back to Canaan House, to the many notes that she’d left for Gideon: scrawled instructions on flimsy, written like words cost nothing. She had felt so young then, and Canaan House had seemed an impossible puzzle brimming with ghosts, a place that filled Harrow with a desperate sense of fearful unease. Now she would give anything to return and walk those hallowed, haunted halls with her cavalier at her side. 

_Gideon,_

_I don’t know how to live without you. I’m not sure I ever have. We’ve spent our entire lives together, bound by a tragic fate long before we ever thought to spit in the face of destiny. If one of us is going to live, it should be you._

Harrow glanced to the sword that lay against the bed, its bone scabbard a filthy ash-grey grime against the pristine white of the sheets. It seemed to glare back at her, bearing all the malice of an enraged Gideon Nav who had just discovered that her sword had been defiled, and Harrow fought back a fresh stab of grief at the thought.

_Gideon,_

_Your sword is stupid, ugly, and clumsy, and far too heavy for me to hold, yet something about it demands that I keep it by my side - doesn’t that remind you of something? Or should I say, someone? I tried to take care of it as best I could, but it remains a cumbersome burden, and the blade is somewhat damaged on the left side. Scarred, pitted; I don’t know what you’d call it. As you well know, I studied necromancy instead of the blade._

_I’m sure that you’ll get the stupid thing back to regulation standards once I’m gone. In fact, I’m counting on it. Unlike me, it has always served you well._

Harrow slowly and methodically ripped this letter to shreds. She had never, and would never, care enough about swords to waste paper on writing about them. She especially would not deign to write about a sword that strongly and manifestly loathed her, even if that loathing was justified.

There was no way that a sword could despise her more than she despised herself. 

_Gideon,_

_You're dead, and I hate you. I’ve hated you for so many things over so many years; I’ve hated you for living, and now I hate you for dying. You weren’t supposed to die. You were never supposed to die. But now you’ve done it anyways: you’ve died and left me behind, and what have I become in your absence? I am no longer a person. I am no longer anything but a thing consumed by grief that waits, desperate and haunted, for your return._

_I hate you for dying. I hate you for turning me into this. I hate you for leaving this universe darker than it was before._

_Come back, Gideon. Please. Just come back._

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. 

Harrow ran her hands through her close-cropped hair, fingers knotting in painful tangles. She tugged harder, and the pain helped to ground her; it anchored her, anguished and aching, in the sea of grief that threatened to drag her under. She did not understand. She still didn’t. 

Harrowhark Nonagesimus was a walking war crime. She was the darkness that had extinguished dozens of lights. She was flesh and blood built from the bones of the Ninth’s innocents, her birth the flame that had lit the funeral pyres of two hundred children, and yet it was the death of Gideon Nav that had finally brought her to irreversible ruin. 

She let out a pitiful noise, dangerously close to a sob, and reached for another sheet of paper. 

_Gideon,_

_In the ancient days, before even necromancy, there was once a practice known as alchemy. The main tenet of this science was simple: it dealt with the transmutation of lead to gold._

_When I first read about this process, in a moth-eaten pamphlet that I found in the back of the Ninth’s library, this transformation seemed an unlikely prospect. How could this ever be possible? And what was gold, anyway, next to bone magic?_

_That night in the pool, surrounded by salt water with your arms around me, I looked into your eyes - so stupidly, beautifully golden, as constant as the north star - and I found my answer. The transformation wasn’t impossible; it was inevitable._

_I don’t know when my feelings for you changed. I don’t know when distrust gave way to faith, when hatred yielded to tolerance and then grudging acceptance. I only know that they did, and maybe they always would have. I have always needed you, whether I admitted it or not._

_What I’m trying to say is, I think that I -_

Harrow paused, her fingers wrapping around the pen until the knucklebones started to crack. A burning heat began to rise in her cheeks, a curious warmth burning against her skin. Abruptly, she snatched the paper from the table and ripped it into pieces so frantically that her hands began to bleed.

She gazed across the room at the cracked mirror that hung on the wall, and her reflection gazed back in shattered piecemeal; broken and fragmented, a study in destruction. As she watched in detached, morbid horror, one of her eyes turned solid gold. 

She could put this off no longer.

Harrow closed her eyes, casting her mind back through the darkness to a place that had felt, temporarily but undeniably, like the center of the universe. She was in Canaan House again, submerged in saltwater, and Gideon’s arms were wrapped tightly around her. 

She was with Gideon, and for one moment, one brief yet infinite moment, they were the only two people alive. All was well. 

“Too many words,” Harrow said to herself, and Gideon’s voice seemed to speak along with her own. A trace of Gideon was there, somewhere in the echoes; it was a respite from the void, a slight lessening of the aching loneliness. Harrow could almost picture her there, sitting next to her. “Try these.” 

Harrow picked up the pen and reached for the last sheet of paper. In a steady, unwavering hand, she wrote the four words.

_ONE FLESH, ONE END._

She stared at this message for a moment, wrapped in the unforgiving grasp of bittersweet memory, and then for some inexplicable reason, she carefully tore off a short, even strip of the paper. She folded this up and placed it in her pocket, sealed the last letter in its envelope along with a battered pair of sunglasses, and placed it with the others.

Then Harrowhark Nonagesimus left her room without a backwards glance and went to seek out her ally. 

\--

“It will be worse for you in the end, Nonagesimus,” Harrow’s ally said. 

Ianthe Tridentarius sat on her bed, hands clenched around an awl and a hammer. Moments earlier, she had pressed her hands to the mattress and told Harrow, with the awful conviction of someone who had never loved anyone besides themself, that she should abandon this foolish juncture; that she was no longer beholden to anyone. “You are running away,” she had said, her voice full of contempt and something like regret, and Harrow had not had the presence of mind nor the inclination to reply: No, I’m running _towards_.

“Do it,” Harrow replied curtly. “Open me up.” 

Since they had come onboard the _Erebos_ , Ianthe had never faltered; she had conducted herself perfectly, a cold and jaded parallel to God’s more anxiety Lyctors. And yet here, now, she waited for just a moment, watching Harrow with something unknowable flickering in her pale-washed violet eyes.

Harrow looked at herself again, her eyes shining in celestial dissonance: black and gold, gold and black. There was no more time to waste, no more moments to spill between thoughts and deeds. The end was near.

“Nonagesimus - ” 

“ _Do it,_ you faithless coward!” Harrow shouted desperately, rage forcing its way into her voice. “You swore me an oath! Expose the brain - guide me - and let me handle it from there! There’s still time, and yet you thieve it from me!” 

“Alright, sister,” Ianthe said, setting the hammer down and taking up the awl. Harrow gritted her teeth, preparing her mouth for the taste of blood. “Time to absolutely fuck you up.” 

Ianthe raised the hammer like an executioner’s blade, and Harrow closed her eyes. Her mind slipped between sunlight and shadow, searching for something she couldn’t quite reach, and her last thought was of golden eyes and an asymmetrical smile.

“Gideon,” Harrow murmured silently, the single word an entire universe between her lips, and the awl fell.

\--

When Harrowhark Nonagesimus awoke, she was holding a blank piece of folded paper between her palms. She looked at it for a puzzled minute, her brain sluggish and uncomprehending, and then tossed it into the waste basket by the door.

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thymewars)


End file.
